Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (25 page)

“Won't do no good against them, Doctor Stroud.”

“Just do it! And tell Mrs. Ashyer to call Ray Carroll to come out here. And ... and tell Ashyer to come out here to give me a hand with the coffins. You got all that, Lonnie? Lonnie?”

“Yes, sir ... yes, sir,” he said, ambling off like a child soon to forget.

“Hurry, Lonnie!”

Lonnie quickened his pace. Stroud could still hear his wasting of words and blubbering nonsense as he made his way to the house. Soon, Ashyer rushed out with a rain slicker and two hunting guns instead of the one Stroud had requested. Ashyer readily bent to the work of removing the coffins from the cargo bay and onto the ground. He took an end and the three trips to the house were accomplished at about the same time the storm broke, sending mad sheets of glasslike rain over the land. Looking out the door from Stroud Manse, Abe thought it looked like midnight. Inside, he found it to be three p.m. He and Magaffey had been a long time at the caves.

“How is Doctor Magaffey?” he asked Mrs. Ashyer.

“He's asking for you, sir, but I think he needs a good rest. That ... that scar on his neck is very bad. He needs true medical attention. I did what I could, using his bag.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Ashyer,” he said, their eyes meeting, telling him that she did not blame him, but that she knew the cause of the calamity.

“What're we to do sir?” she asked. “I mean, if they ... if they come?”

“Stupid question, woman,” Ashyer said to her. “We fight for our lives, or we take our lives. Right, Doctor Stroud?”

“I pray it will not come to that.”

“But they're surely amassing against you, sir,” she said.

“They are.” He rushed to Magaffey in the parlor where he'd been lain out on a blanket hastily thrown over the ottoman.

“How're you feeling, old man?”

“Like the poor guy who was nearly cut in two in 
The Pit and the Pendulum.
”

“Banaker's talons were like a pendulum the way he slashed across your neck.”

“Tried to take my head off, I figure. Lost feeling to parts of my left side ... fingers especially, tingling all the way through my arm. First time I ever had to prescribe for myself anything stronger than aspirin.”

“You're looking a great deal better than when I put you into the helicopter.”

“I don't remember that.”

“Rest now.”

“Rest, how?”

“You can't put pressure on that wound; it'll burst and you'll bleed to death, you understand, and I need you right now, so just rest, please!” he shouted.

“Sure, sure, son.”

Stroud frowned. “Sorry, but I mean it, Magaffey.”

“Sounded like your granddad there for a moment. Look, Abe, what're we going to do?”

“Right now, we sit out the storm. I've got some thinking to do.”

“Thinking won't do the trick, son. 
Action.
 We need to take action.” Magaffey ended with a cough that racked his frame. Neither his color, which was ashen, nor his inability to speak without long hesitations, nor this coughing looked good to Stroud. He did need medical attention, but the only medical attention in Andover was Banaker's kind--and that kind no one needed. Little wonder most of the patients who checked into the Institute never checked out. What a clearing house and convenient conversion center. Take in the weakly human at his most vulnerable, when he is easy prey, and either feed on him or turn him to doing your bidding. How many people in Andover, in how many different walks of life, had been converted by the likeable, politic Dr. Oliver Banaker?

He thought of Timmy Meyers in the hospital--revived by Banaker's bone marrow concoction, perhaps? Or had Magaffey gotten the boy out before that stage of his development toward becoming a full-fledged vampire? They might never know, but if they came through this alive, and if the Banaker people were put down, then a search would have to go out for the Meyerses, and Timmy would have to be brought back and tested. A simple blood test would be evidence enough.

“I won't be long, Doctor,” Stroud told Magaffey.

“The bodies? The evidence?” he wheezed.

“Safely in house at the moment. Placed it in cold storage. We have a walk-in freezer here.”

Magaffey nodded his approval before he closed his eyes and died. At first Stroud thought he'd just gone to sleep, but immediately after he sensed it. The old fellow was gone. 
Noble old man,
 he said silently to himself before informing the Ashyers. Ashyer and he placed the body in the freezer with the others.

“You know, sir, they won't rest until everyone at Stroud Manse is dead,” said Ashyer glumly before leaving him alone with Magaffey once more.

“I'm sorry I did not listen to you sooner, Doctor,” he said to Magaffey's corpse before closing the door on the dead.

He felt he had so needed Magaffey's counsel. Magaffey knew about the properties of the bone marrow drink. He would know how to go about “poisoning” the vampires' supply, stored, no doubt somewhere at the Institute, just as the vampires themselves were stored throughout Andover. Exactly where, he could not be sure. He went to the circular room, only half hearing Mrs. Ashyer tell him that Ray Carroll was on his way this moment, anxious to assist.

In the quiet of the torture chamber, Abe Stroud mulled over his dilemma. He'd brought with him Magaffey's papers on the Banaker 
Bloody Mary,
 as the old man called it in his report. The properties were those of a super-charged blood plasma with the added ingredients of an unknown genetic material and bone marrow.

Stroud guessed the unknown ingredient to be a 
vampire gene.
 Banaker was into genetic splicing. He'd taken the best of human blood and the best of vampire blood and had created a new strain of the liquid of life. “The life of the flesh is in the blood,” he said, quoting Leviticus 17:11. Stroud knew a lot about blood from firsthand knowledge. He knew that there was nothing in nature that had so profound an emotional effect on people as blood--unless it was the human skull. For blood could cause a person to faint, make his head reel, while at the same time irresistibly attracting him. At the same time that it inspired disgust, nausea, and a desire to murder, it amazed and fascinated. Some police shrinks believed that the underlying motive behind sexual murder was nearly always the desire to shed blood and not the desire to cause death. Some nut they'd caught after a series of murders one year in Chicago had killed people only so he could wipe their blood over his skin in the honest belief that to do so would keep him ever young and ever strong.

The Banaker family had learned medicine and modern technologies enough to know all of this and much more, to use the genetic coding of their race to infiltrate that of the human race, and to become as close to normal people as possible. Banaker had taken the medium of blood to create a new class of vampire. The gods and demons in Ancient Babylonia and Greece, according to the superstitions of the time, were attracted to the smell of bloodshed, especially to the bodies of the violently slain. In which case, Stroud thought, Satan had had a field day in Vietnam, and was now having a merry time in Andover, Illinois.

“From the emanations of shed blood,” he heard himself saying as his thoughts became words, “disembodied entities--
spirits
--build up appearances and become visible.”

He could not believe the thought that next crossed his mind, and yet he needed counsel--he needed the counsel of his forefathers, of his grandfather! And there might be a way to gather Ananias's ghost here, to him. The way was clear, but it was also 
ghoulish.
 It might also backfire. Could he do it? he asked himself moments before bolting off for the bodies in the freezer upstairs.

When he stormed upstairs, shouting for Ashyer to help him transport all the bodies to the central chamber, Ashyer hesitated a moment and asked, “Are you sure, sir?”

“I am certain. Let's do it.”

At the same time the intercom announced a peeling of thunder outside, followed by Ray Carroll's voice. “Let him through, Lonnie!” Stroud told Wilson, who stood at the controls.

When the door opened for Carroll, Stroud and Ashyer were hefting Magaffey's body down the hallway.

-19-

Ray Carroll was aghast at the sight before him, his eyes telling the story, telling the others his immediate thoughts as if they were thrown up on a screen: he had stepped into a madhouse where the inmates had already done considerable damage. He thought he was witness to the murder of Dr. Martin Magaffey.

“Carroll!” shouted Stroud when he realized what must be going through the man's mind. “We need your assistance and help, perhaps the help of your friends, anyone in the town you know whom we can trust. Magaffey's been killed by vampires.”

“Vampires? Vampires? Are you crazy?” Carroll was more than a little skeptical and he held himself firmly at the door which was ajar, rain pelting in, puddling about his feet where he dripped on the tiles.

“Doctor Magaffey, Bradley and his wife, and others, all murdered by creatures that, for lack of a better word, are vampires, yes!”

“Vampires? Stroud, that's ... that's just madness to say that Doctor Magaffey was killed by vampires.”

“A colony of them living in Andover! There's no time to explain. Suffice it to say that Banaker is one of them, most likely the leader. I have irrefutable evidence that this mutated race of demonic creatures does exist, and if you will come with me, I'll show it to you.”

“Evidence ... irrefutable...”

“Yes, Carroll! The Meyers boy, the other disappearances, all stem from the fact that Banaker's Institute is a haven and a feeding ground for ghouls, vampires, whatever you wish to call them! I know it's hard to believe, but Magaffey had proof that they're feeding on the unearthed remains of humans, using bone marrow as an ingredient to insure the strengthening of the mutated gene that created them in the first place.”

Carroll found a chair and literally fell into it. “I ... I knew there was something strange going on, but Doctor Stroud, I ... I find this hard to accept.”

“Come with me then. Trust me long enough that I might show you the evidence.”

He nodded. “Yes, of course. I'll follow you.” Carroll glanced again at Magaffey and the throat bandages, soaked in red.

Stroud said to Ashyer, “We'll get Doctor Magaffey to his destination in a moment, Ashyer. I'll be right back.”

Stroud showed Carroll the way to the walk-in freezer, explaining how Magaffey had come to him with the elixir and had convinced him to go with him to the caves where they'd been attacked by batlike creatures, the size and density of human beings. Carroll remained skeptical, just as Stroud expected, and he hesitated at the door to the freezer. He had seen ice crystals forming on Magaffey's body outside. He didn't relish the idea of being locked in the freezer and left there to die a slow death by the madman Stroud. He indicated that Stroud should go first. But he remained reluctant, standing at the doorway, even when Stroud stood on the far side to peel back a blanket that'd been placed over the pod that contained what remained of Pamela Carr. He only came closer when Stroud asked him to do so.

Ray Carroll seemed to have gone white, all the blood draining from his features. He seemed claustrophobic and was visibly shaking, either from the cold or the horror of what lay on the block before him. A second cocoon, that containing the Bradley woman, lay nearby, and this, too, gave rise to a gasp from Carroll.

“This is not the handiwork of any madman, Ray! Ray, this material, this pod is tightly woven like the silk of caterpillars. I know it makes no sense to you. Makes none to me either, but Doctor Cooper was inside one of these too and--”

“Cooper? Cooper from the Institute?”

“He was still alive when we cut into the cocoon.”

“Oh, oh, my...” He looked faint now, as if unable to get air. His gaze over Pam Carr was long and sad. “And you say that Banaker is ... is responsible for ... for this?”

“Banaker, the others at the Institute, Pam here, Cooper, they're all of another race, a mutant race which our forefathers called vampires. I don't know but Magaffey studied the properties of the bone marrow drink and he concluded they've got what science nowadays calls a ... a jumping gene--”

“Jumping gene?”

“Ahhh.” Stroud shook his head, knowing he was on shaky ground. “Jumping gene, pieces of DNA that move about the chromosomes, parasites that actually live inside the DNA that trigger mutations. Magaffey was going on about it for some time before we got to the caves, something about the natural and unnatural order of evolutionary process. At any rate, here is the result.”

“So, the cold storage is to protect the evidence, I see.”

“Without the pods, who'd believe us?”

“But what about Magaffey's body? Where are you taking it?” Carroll was almost out the freezer door, unable to take anymore, it seemed. Stroud didn't press him any further, allowing him to escape. Outside, he shivered and spoke of how uncomfortable cold places made him. But Stroud sensed that it was not the cold at all, but the pods and their ugly contents that made Carroll visibly ill and shaken, despite the fact he made no reference to being aghast or uncomfortable over the pods or the poor souls inside them. His white face told all.

Stroud thought it odd at first, but the man's mind was being asked to take in so much at once, Stroud knew he must be patient with Carroll. “Now that Doctor Magaffey's gone, I need you with me, Ray.”

“Sure, sure, Doctor Stroud. I've seen enough to convince me.”

“Can you get us additional help?”

“Additional help?”

“Yes, any moment, I believe, we're going to be under attack here by ... by them.”

“I see. Yes, let me get on my CB, see if I can raise some of the boys.”

Stroud recalled how many men had come on the double when the call went out for the Meyers boy. He felt a little comforted in knowing they'd soon have the help of neighbors.

From the freezer, they returned to Ashyer who'd patiently waited for help with Magaffey's body, Lonnie Wilson still useless in this regard. Ray Carroll passed by the mirror, his reflection turning eerily and shakily in and around on itself as if the image were one on a computer screen that was not getting enough power to it, but only Lonnie Wilson saw this.